Sunday, December 18, 2011

My table has 99 problems. None of them are related to women because it's a table.

For starters, I've got the main shelf structure together. A few problems I've run into:

I didn't consider that the welded-on shelves would get in the way of the rollers. They do. I noticed after I'd only put on a few of them. A little angle grinding solved the ones I had on there. For the others, I just had then stick out the back a bit instead. This caused them to block the cross bracing in some areas. More angle grinding and some hack-saw.

The shelf that slides up and down needs to be put on by sliding it underneath the shelf structure. Unfortunately each side of the shelf structure weighs about 90lbs. They're just within my limit to easily maneuver. I believe I'm too weak to safely tilt a constructed setup backward so I can put the movable shelves on. I also don't believe the cross bracing would survive this. The shelves must be put on and then the main structure assembled. That's a bitch.

The cross bracing is generally too weak for how much the structure as a whole weighs. There's nothing that keeps it from bowing out. It'll have to be replaced with cut angle iron.

I've mounted the motor on the moving shelf. It does run but it makes a terrible racket. I need to run it more and investigate what exactly is being so damn loud.

During some light stress testing I also had one of the pegs for the rollers just fall off. It looked the welds were bad. I took an old piece I'd done as a test before doing this one and took a hammer to the pegs. They all bent instead of broke off. From that experiment I concluded that this piece was done badly but the process in general was good. I re-welded all the pegs on the existing piece and attached a new one in place of the one that fell off.

I've mounted the winch on the top piece. This just sits across both shelves. There's nothing particularly wrong with it except that I had to make pieces that kept it from tipping over and I didn't make them long enough the first time because I wasn't thinking.